How do I cut a hole in a polygon?
 

I've been trying to do this and I can't find the function that does that... I basically want to make a hole (cut out) a peice of geometry out of a Polygon object I made...

I tried the Make Hole Tool but that doesnt help...

any others?

Thanks
-Emo

You've got booleans, extruding faces and simply deleting faces as options as well.

The thing is this, I want to cut a circular hole from a face... I tried booleans but they didnt work, and I cant delete the face because i need it (I only need a small hole in it)

-Emo

Hmm, what happened when you tried the booleans function?

the boolean should have worked jut fine.. did you delete history before you did the boolean..
how about doin' what mike said.. extrude the face and scale it inwards.. to the size you want.. then just delete it.. are you goin' to smooth out the area later..? if so you could split the faces around that hole and pull those new verts around to make it more circular.. later when smoothed it should be round enough..

Have you tried making a cylinder with an open end then subtracting it from the face? What I mean is put the open end of the cylinder where you want the hole and then subtract it from the face.....so make the cylinder the size you want etc...but not to long just a short cylinder.


hope that gives ya some inspiration :D

I can't tell you teh exacty error message but it said something about how it needs 2 funcions to do this but I only had 1...

anyway, I'll try the other options you suggested so we'll see :D

thanks again!
-Emo

Perhaps... do you know how to use the booleans?
Remember to pick your first object and then shift select the second one, and then perform the boolean.

Hope it helps ..

yes, that's what I did...

the problem is that I dont know what to pick... difference, intersect or what...

another problem is that the geometry that I have is somewhat complex and it takes a long time for Maya to calculate the boolean and it freezes for minutes at a time until it's done...

-Emo

if nothing else works, than the hard way is to use Split Polygong and split a circular face into your surface and then extrude it inwards

ok, I tried the boolean and I got this error:

after that, my 2 objects disappear...

mtmckinley, how do I make a circular face with teh split polygon tool?

-Emo

It's just a matter of "drawing" it into your surface with the tool. It may help to put a nurbs circle over it as a guide.

well for some reason it just lets me draw straight lines that go from edge to edge and I need a circle...

-Emo

yes, that's the way the split poly tool works... you'll just need to cut it a bit to get what you want. Even circles are just made up of a LOT of little straight lines. lol

You know, I myself have run into this problem several times. Booleans are useful, but sometimes not practical. It's really hard to get them to work, especially on objects with complex topology. You should be able to somehow attach a circular CV curve or a basic Nurbs curve to an object or specific face and have it form a face when it does. The problem with the polygon make hole tool is that the object you select to make the hole has to be a face from the original object, which if I am correct, doesn't allow you to modify the face how you want. Arr!